Young author Sayrafiezadeh's first collection of stories has already established himself as a unique American voice

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh's collection of linked stories, Brief Encounters With the Enemy (Dial), makes for a tantalizing fiction debut from the author of the popular, Whiting Award–winning memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free, in which he, the son of an Iranian father and a Jewish mother, described growing up in Pittsburgh. The eight longish tales in Brief Encounters take place in an unnamed contemporary American industrial city and in far-flung war zones; they feature young men whose mainly blue-collar lives are circumscribed by their alternately hapless and heroic searches for identity, camaraderie, upward mobility, and, if not romance, at least a little sex.

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In the strong title story—narrated, like the rest, in the first person—a soldier named Luke describes going out on patrol: "The first time I went up the path, it was terrifying. I could barely take a full breath, let alone put one foot in front of the other. If I'd had to run, I wouldn't have remembered how." Yet after a month, "the fear dissipated and the path started to become fascinating, even charming." Then, on Luke's final patrol on his last day of deployment, something life-altering happens. From start to finish the story menaces and mesmerizes.

In "Appetite," a cook named Ike fights for a raise from his ruthlessly manipulative but disarmingly soft-faced manager. Even the restaurant's kitchen seems like a war zone: "Once in a while, one cook will come to the aid of another who has fallen far behind, as if in battle, and this is always viewed as an act of extreme kindness. Generally, though, it's every man for himself, and we let one another die facedown in the mud."

In "Enchantment," a middle-school history teacher named Jake returns from an 18-month hitch in the military to discover that his students prefer the substitute teacher. A series of classroom skirmishes break out that Jake realizes he can't win.

The cumulative energy of these koanlike stories holds together the weaker narrative links—the occasional passage that wanders out of focus or lies still on the page like a sleep-deprived soldier—in surprising and satisfying ways.